Shopping for products and goods at large warehouse and department stores has grown in popularity. Many attempts have been made to improve the flow of customers and products through these stores. Under conventional product checkout methods, the customer must wait in long lines and suffer the “bottle neck” effect at the checkout counter.
Recently stores have tried to reduce the “bottle neck” effect by introducing “self check-out” schemes that incorporate scanners to allow customers to checkout their own merchandise. These new schemes have had limited success and do not adequately improve shopping cart checkout efficiency. Long checkout lines still exist during peak hours.
Yet another problem with current checkout methods is the lack of adequate security measures. Some stores provide security tags on each product. Store personnel must deactivate security tags before a customer leaves the store. If the security tag is not deactivated and a person attempts to remove a product from the store, an alarm will sound. In yet other cases, stores that do not have security tags must lock up expensive products in a protected cabinet and have an attendant unlock the cabinet when a customer shows interest. These methods of product security are inefficient and require the intervention of store personnel.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improved techniques that provide automatic product recognition, product security and efficient checkout of products before a customer leaves the store.
Unless otherwise indicated illustrations in the figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.